This is why so many Americans view university as an elitist institution :) I agree about high school. High school is why I decided the education system was not for me (right or wrong, it was just a horrible experience).
I learned #1 while cold calling businesses to sell phone systems. You have to talk to people, make friends, and genuinely understand why companies operate the way they do. You can learn how large the world is without sitting in a classroom.
I learned #2... well in every job I've had.
What I feel I missed by not finishing university was the time to deeply understand a single subject. But then again, I was taking classes all over the spectrum. Maybe I was never meant for a deep understanding of a single subject.
OTOH, as far as recommending non-traditional paths, I wouldn't for my kids. I am extremely self driven. I never realized that most people are not this way.
I myself didn't graduate, because the allure of starting a company was too strong. Here I am 20 years later advising people with degrees. If you are dedicated enough and creative enough (in the hacker kind of way) you can become skilled in just about anything you want.
However without a degree there are doors that are closed to you. For example the UC system will not even consider you for an MBA if you don't have an undergraduate degree. Don't even bother applying. Other private institutions will consider you but you need to be absolutely exceptional to get in.
I use that just as one example. People with a degree (especially a good degree) can stroll into an opportunity that I have to work 10X harder to to get. That said, once I'm in I tend to outperform my peers simply because I'm used to a world set on "hard mode" at all times.
Another thing I'm lacking are the deep friendships and connections that people who have a degree seem to have. That, to me, is the biggest loss from skipping a degree. Despite significant effort I don't seem to be able to make that part up.
“The Second Gate: The Places That Have Not Known Love
There is another entrance to grief, a second gateway, different from the gate connected to losing someone or something that we love. This grief occurs in the places often untouched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives. We often hate these parts of ourselves, hold them in contempt, and refuse to allow them the light of day. We do not show these outcast brothers and sisters to anyone, and we thereby deny these parts of ourselves the healing salve of community.
These neglected pieces of soul live in utter despair. What we perceive as defective about ourselves, we also experience as loss. Whenever any portion of who we are is denied, we live in a condition of loss. The proper response to any loss is grief, but we cannot grieve for something that we feel is outside the circle of worth. That is our predicament—we chronically sense the presence of sorrow, but we are unable to truly grieve, because we feel in our body that this piece of who we are is unworthy of grief.”
“The Fourth Gate: What We Expected and Did Not Receive
There is another gate to grief, one difficult to identify, yet it is very present in each of our lives. This threshold into sorrow calls forward the things that we may not even realize we have lost. I have written elsewhere about the expectations coded into our physical and psychic lives. When we are born, and as we pass through childhood, adolescence, and the stages of adulthood, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, and reflection. In short, we expect what our deep-time ancestors experienced as their birthright, namely, the container of the village. We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred. As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land “Once upon a time, we knew the world from birth.” This is our inheritance, our birthright, which has been lost and abandoned. The absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can’t give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadness that settles over us like a fog. This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it difficult to grieve. On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows.”
- Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
The tech industry generally rewards those who can self-teach (tech is constantly changing), self-organize, and put in the effort.
A lot of people say university helps build a professional network.
Well anything you put put 4-8 years of concentrated effort into will help build a professional network. And if you go the route of internships and jr. level roles, you'll be paid while you do it.
A couple of points:
- going to college has nothing to do with whether you can write good software. Even CS grads do a ton of learning on the job, and lots of great developers started as hobbyists or came in from unrelated fields.
- Going to University doesn't guarantee you a good job. When I waited tables, I knew busboys with masters degrees.
- You can get hired (even for senior / principal level roles) without a degree. The degree doesn't mean you are good at what you do, and so it's often not a factor in hiring.
The exception is junior positions which are easier to get with a degree, but this discrepancy vanishes after you break into the industry.
The US spends ~3.5% of GDP on non-tertiary education and ~2.5% on tertiary education. If what you are saying is representative of the general population, it means there is a massive unjustified waste of resources.
I am not a job. I am not a career.
I learned two important things at university that I doubt I could have picked up otherwise.
1. I learned how broad knowledge is. I learned about things I did not even know I did not know about. Some of these things I learned in classrooms. Most I learned outside of classrooms, either through interaction with my peers or by accident while researching something unrelated in the library. Sometimes by hacking on the school computers. In high school I learned that being smart is bad. In university I learned there are people who value thinking.
2. I learned how to organize my time to complete tasks I had no personal interest in, how to force myself to work despite my dislike of team mates or organizers, and to finish by deadlines. I only wish I had learned these things before my 6th and 7th years in university, but alas.
You don't need to go to university. We will always need garbage collectors and street sweepers, and remember, anyone can write bad software. Vendors continue to try to make it easier to do so.